Down to Adelaide and beyond

No that photo hasn’t been played with in any way, the sky was that blue and the salt lake was that orange/pink colour. I’ve been surprised at how many pink lakes there are around Australia, this is the fourth one I’ve seen without trying to find them.

I couldn’t get a replacement tire the same as mine in Port Augusta, so I bought a puncture repair kit and a can or tyre fix and figured I’d get a tyre in Adelaide in a few days.We camped at the show grounds in the foothills of Mount Remarkable just outside the sleepy little town of Melrose.

Not a lot here at all, but nice countryside and the showgrounds were only $10 a night for hot showers and toilets and your pick of where to camp anywhere over their 100 acres. We camped near the sports oval and watched them practice football in the evening as we ate dinner. From here we drove out and explored a bit, Alligator gorge was nice with quite an interesting drive in, though Chinaman creek wasn’t so exciting.

Returning to the camp at the show grounds I stepped out of the car and had to take a second look. The exact same driver side rear tyre was almost completely flat, that was the spare we’d put on the car up north of the Flinders. Those words echoed in my head for a minute, that was the spare, there was no other spare, I now had 2 flat tyres.  In such situations there’s only one thing you can do, laugh, and I did.

Luckily I was with Cloudy (Mavis), and the next morning she cleared out some of her stuff from the back of her Tarago van, we loaded the two wheels into the back and headed into Port Augusta. All good, after a day in town wandering around eating lunch and window shopping, I had two new tyres fitted and we got back in time for me to fit one wheel, when we packed and moved to the next spot.

Ippinitchi camp ground in the Wirribara forest reserve. Only $5 a night and you get long drop toilet, though it’s a bit tricky booking in. You must continue down the road for another 3km to self register and pay for your camp site, we followed the signs to the office and were led to a dead end, but managed to back track and go a different way.

Why would you be having a giggle and taking a photo of your camp registration form?

Because your booking in under the names Bob and Mavis Gibbon. These were names we adopted back at point Gibbon during Easter when we talked about all the old grey nomads we’d each met along the way, the interesting characters and the way couples would often act and speak to each other.  For a bit of fun we would break into characters of Bob and Mavis with voices and actions to go along with it and pretend we were one of those old couples. “Would you like a cup of tea Mavis?”, “Yes Bob that would be lovely”, “Look at those young kids with their music blaring” etc.   It was all a bit of fun and we figured that Forestries really didn’t need to know our real name, plus we’d given our correct names the day before. And yes I couldn’t remember my cars registration.

We were doing a 12km forest circuit walk through the area when a strange thing happened, we saw a woman walking towards us in the distance, she was the only other person we’d seen all day and she stopped to put something down, a little joey she was taking out for a walk. She had adopted it months earlier after the mother had been hit by a car and now it was over 12 months old she takes it out for  walk every day. We wandered along the walk trail chatting while oohing and aahing over this little joey bounding along following behind us. It’s always good to meet a local, she took us to an old interesting quarry where she had her wedding photos taken, before pointing us in the direction of our camp.

I’ve been a little slack with the photos on this leg of my travels, and it gets even worse. We left camp and headed to Adelaide for a night in a caravan park. I needed to top up water and also plug into power for a bit, three nights camping under shady trees with “no generator” rules meant that I was getting low. On the way to Adelaide was where I saw the pink lake.

 

But why do I say that it gets worse? Because I don’t have one single photo of Adelaide. Oops.! After arriving and setting up in a caravan park on the outskirts of town, I went into the burbs and stocked up with things I needed. Then back to the park for washing, cleaning and topping up water tanks, before you know it the day is gone. Check out is 10 in the morning and I really didn’t want to stay another night, over $30 a night for a small plot near the main highway wasn’t my idea of fun. Trying to get into the main centre of Adelaide with the van hooked up that day just didn’t seem worth it, and finding a place to drop the van wasn’t simple either. So I wandered off into the hills heading towards the Murray River without even seeing Adelaide, well just the burbs and some industrial areas. Cloudy spent quite a bit of time both days travelling around the city, catching buses and wandering the heart of the CBD, ahh the joys of travelling in a small camper van.